semper ad meliora
by kathillards
Summary: He's lost track of how often he's thought about kissing her. —- JasonKat


**notes:** warnings for pov-switching and time-skipping. goes from zeo to dino thunder with very little warning. enjoy!

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 **always towards better things**

-:-

 _in one timeline we kiss but the stars don't come down._

-:-

He's lost track of how often he's thought about kissing her.

At this point, it's almost like second nature. Muscle memory. She smiles at him sometimes and it feels like his world stops. It's nothing grandiose, nothing spectacular. No true love, no prince charming. Just the ticking of the clock pounding in his ears and her laughter ringing in his heart.

It's nothing, really. Just something that crosses his mind on Tuesdays and Thursdays and weekends and Mondays when they're sitting together and alone and her hand brushes his and it's nothing. It can't be anything.

Billy is the only one to notice, just before he leaves. He says, "You should tell her. It might help," but everyone knows it won't. It's not like Billy can't see the way she smiles at Tommy, the way he touches her hands, the way they share laughter in the way lovers do.

"There's nothing to tell," he says and says goodbye to his oldest friend as he leaves for another planet. Kat squeezes his hand in comfort the next day, and he wishes it didn't hurt so much.

He's been in love before. Hell, he's been in love _now_. It's not supposed to feel like this – guilt and secrets and wanting to not wish the things he's wishing for. Love is supposed to be happy and kind and selfless.

This is the most selfish he's ever been. So, he lets himself fall in love with another girl, blonde hair, pretty eyes, different smile, and pretends he never thought those things he shouldn't have thought.

(Sometimes, though, on Wednesdays and Saturdays and certain Sundays, he watches her kiss his best friend and thinks it could be amazing, the two of them and a kiss and the world stuttering to a stop around them.)

(But it doesn't.)

It's a Friday and it's cold outside and he's alone until he's not and she's there and she's warm and he's missed her and she smiles and she says, _London wasn't that great_ , and he wishes he had the self-control to stop himself.

He'd imagined she tasted like strawberries. She tastes like peaches and she kisses him back but she draws away first and it's futile, he knows, to try and keep her, so he doesn't try.

"I missed you," he says to her retreating back. It's starting to snow. She glances over her shoulder, but doesn't stop.

The world spins on.

-:-

 _in another you set a world on fire for me but i perish in the flames_

-:-

The day he almost dies on the moon, she ends up at his doorstep with shaking hands and a pounding heart and his coffee order next to hers. When he opens the door, half-dressed and half-awake, she shoves the drink at him and marches inside without asking.

"Good morning," he says in bemusement, watching as she stops and stares at his living room. "Did you need something?"

"Why didn't you tell me?" she breathes, her voice unsteady and her heartbeat echoing in her ears. "You – you went off to the moon to fight the Machine Empire and you _didn't tell me_."

Jason goes still for a moment, and she doesn't have to look at him to know the expression on his face. "Why aren't you asking Tommy?" he asks finally, a desperate deflection, and she knows it.

Whirling on him, she says, coldly, "Tommy and I don't talk anymore."

He raises his eyebrows. "That's a lie."

She doesn't know who he's trying to convince. "Jason – "

" _Kat_ ," he says, and catches her wrists in his hand and uses them to haul her close until their chests touch and she can feel his forehead press against hers. "I'm _fine_."

There's a moment where it feels like maybe he is, like maybe she could be. Like she could lift her head and kiss him and it would all be all right. Her hand touches his bare chest, palm over his heart, listening to its rhythm beneath her fingers – _thump thump thump_. He's alive. _She's_ alive.

"You should have called me," she whispers, her eyelashes fluttering against his cheeks as she looks up at him. "You should have called _us_. We're your _team_ – "

"Are you?" he demands and she freezes. "You and Tommy don't talk to each other. Adam doesn't talk to anyone. Tanya is too busy. Rocky is all alone. Are you really still a team?"

Kat doesn't miss the undercurrent, the way he doesn't include himself. _I have another team_ , but she doesn't, she _doesn't_. She wants to scream.

She shoves him away. He stumbles backward, not far, but enough. "It was our fight," she says, and he looks away. "They were our monsters. It was _our_ fight."

She grabs her coffee and leaves him standing there, watching the ghost of a girl he used to know walk away from the hero she'd thought he was.

-:-

 _another and we're strangers on a busy street, brushing by close enough to send each other reeling off balance but not stopping_

-:-

He runs into her in a city full of dreams and stars, music blaring out of cars and everyone a stranger keeping secrets from themselves. Los Angeles is a loud city, a wild city, a city where the monsters hide in shadows instead of the skies. She's a flash of blonde curls and a pink dress in the middle of a crowded street and for a second, he doesn't even believe his eyes.

She doesn't notice him. He spins, swerves to avoid people, stares at her retreating form. It feels a little like déjà vu, except this time, she doesn't look back.

When he gets to Zack's house, he wants to ask, but he doesn't. It would be easy to make it seem casual, make it seem meaningless, but Zack has known him longer than almost anybody, and would see right through him.

So he doesn't ask. The vision of a pink-dressed blonde in the middle of the street haunts his dreams for days, but he doesn't ask. He calls up Tommy, but he doesn't ask.

Her words of a year ago echo in his mind: _Tommy and I don't talk anymore_ , but then, juxtaposed, _We're your team_ and _It was our fight_ and he doesn't know how true anything is, not even what's in his own heart.

"You look lost," Zack comments once during his stay on a night when you can't see the stars for smoke outside the window and they've got cold beers and a growing ache in their heads. "Like you're searching for someone and you don't know who or why."

"That's not true," he protests, but only because he does know who. He's always known who. "What if I did something really bad when I was in high school and I'm still trying to figure it out?"

"Like what?" Zack asks, not even missing a beat.

He looks down at his half-empty beer bottle. "I fell in love with my best friend's girlfriend."

There's a pause as Zack contemplates this. A pause as he thinks over Tommy's two girlfriends: as different as night and day and yet both with the same powers, the same color, the same strength. Another pause as he studies Jason.

Then he says, "Kat lives nearby, y'know."

He opens his mouth but it's dry. He doesn't know what to ask now. Doesn't know how to ask it. So he lets the words die in his throat.

The evening he leaves Los Angeles, he finds a girl in pink at the airport. She has headphones in her ears and her fingers are tap-tap-tapping away at a sleek pink phone, but this time, when he brushes past her, arm to arm, she looks up.

For a brief second, it feels like enough. And then she looks away again, and it doesn't.

-:-

 _somewhere there's a final space where your hand on my face is the punchy climax to an epic saga_

-:-

She finds him next at a Christmas party at their teenage hangout, all their friends and teammates and family invited by the owners to light a tree and give gifts and enjoy a feast together like the old days. He's leaning against a wall, surveying the festivities as their friends, old and new, pile into the room, and she's sitting at the bar, waiting for a miracle.

She doesn't go to him, but she wants to. He meets her gaze, but she breaks it. Life has gone on since the days when they would stand here, all of sixteen, and save the world and fight the impossible.

These days, everything is all too possible, and it makes the impossible seem even scarier. She remembers the taste of his kiss too vividly for having been so many years ago. She remembers too many things about him. His favorite song. His laugh. The way his eyes look when he smiles.

"Kat," says Tommy when he shows up, a group of ragtag teenage superheroes in tow, and sees her sitting by herself, and his smile shoots her straight back into being sixteen. "You look beautiful."

She looks down. She's stopped wearing pink; her dress is shades of white and gold. She looks back across the room and sees Jason in black and red. She wants to laugh. She doesn't.

"So, you're black now?" she teases, and he grins at her, nodding to where Conner is hero-worshipping Jason and Ethan has clung to Billy's side and Kira has sought out Tanya for an autograph and Trent is commiserating with Adam in a corner.

"The world needed saving," Tommy says absently, touches her hand. "You'd have done it, too, if you were there."

But she wasn't. She thinks about Astronema's countdown, watching in horror from London. She thinks about Zordon dying, the blast felt around the galaxy, shivering in her dorm from power and grief and anger. She thinks about the mission to the moon, how ten rangers went and only two had ever been on her team.

She thinks about Tommy, how he hasn't changed at all. Older, and with shorter hair, but still a hero. Always up for saving the world. A new team, a new color, and still, at the heart of it, still Tommy.

"I think you have too much faith in me," she says, ducking her head over her drink, stirring around the strawberries.

"I think you have too little faith in yourself," he says, looking at her like he knows – like he knows she has always had too little faith in herself. She's run out of counterpoints.

Leaning over, he presses a kiss to her cheek and wishes her a merry Christmas before drifting off to mingle with others, leaving her standing alone to think about yesterdays and tomorrows and the spaces in between where anything could happen.

Tonight feels less like a walk down memory lane and more like the crescendo of a story where she doesn't know the ending. She walks up to him in the middle of a room filled with their loved ones and tries to remember how to breathe.

He looks like he doesn't know if he should smile or not and then he says her name like a prayer on his lips and she's forgotten how it felt to have his heart in her hands.

"Jason," she says, the word lingering in the air like a frosty breath exhaled in the chilly evening, and he reaches up and brushes her hair from her face, his fingers soft over her cheeks, and – and –

-:-

 _where the way our mouths meet takes the breath right out of people's throats_

-:-

He doesn't kiss her that night, but he thinks about it for days afterward, the memories fluttering around his mind until they meld into a picture-perfect landscape of true love and happily ever afters. She had looked so pretty and so lonely and so lost that Christmas Eve, flowers around her neck and a snowstorm hanging over her head.

And he misses her. He tells this to Kimberly a month after, over coffee at her apartment with the sun coming up over the edge of the horizon, and she looks at him with a wistful smile and tells him, _You're lucky_.

"For what?" he asks, dumbfounded, wondering when the girl he'd shared his first kiss with had gone from starry-eyed gymnast to black-coffee-drinking olympian star, and how much had changed since then.

"That you can still miss people," she explains, and shows him her phone. The top three on her speed-dial are names he doesn't recognize. Once, he'd been on there. Him, Trini, Tommy. He looks down at his phone and realizes that none of them are there, either.

"We were never anything," he says, but he's imagining a world where they were, where she fell in love with him instead, where they kissed under the mistletoe at Christmas and everyone laughed and cheered and said, _It's about time._

"But you could have been," Kimberly says, her nails bright pink and loud as she taps them on her coffee mug. For some reason, the gesture takes him back to a time when she had taken her coffee with sugar and looked at him like every day was going to be beautiful. And it was. And it had been.

"So could we," he points out and she laughs and looks away. "You can't say that to me, Kim. Not about Kat."

"Fine," she says, standing up from the table, her old fire flickering in her eyes. "Fine, I'll say something else. You're a goddamn coward, Jason. You always have been."

He stares at her, thinking of all the reasons she's wrong – _I fought the monsters, I saved the world, I saved_ you _, Kimberly_ – but he doesn't. Because she's not.

"You'll risk your body but never your heart. You'll fight everyone's monsters but keep yours buried in your heart. And you wonder why your teams are falling apart? You're supposed to be a _leader_ , Jason."

He says, "So, I should have kissed her?"

Kim rolls her eyes. "You should have kissed _me_. Years ago. And yes, you should have kissed her, the first chance you got. And you didn't. And now look where you are."

"Where am I, Kimberly?" he asks, rubbing a hand over his eyes. "Tell me where I am."

She sits down across from him again and takes his hands in hers. "You're in New York and she's in Los Angeles and there's a million miles between you and that's where you are, Jason. That's the only place you'll ever be, if you keep going like this."

He stares at her for a second, then asks, "Do you miss Tommy?"

She snorts. "No," she says, and then she takes her phone and dials Kat's number and shoves it in his hand. "That's the difference between us, Jase."

He stares down at the ringing phone and wishes he were braver.

-:-

 _one universe has us right, of all the millions stacked on millions_

-:-

She lies down on her bed in an apartment in the heart of Los Angeles, the phone pressed to her ear, her hair a halo around her head, and thinks about life and love and growing up and growing old. Thinks about him, and her, and the way they look together in high school pictures. Thinks about high school and graduating and leaving friends behind.

Thinks about leaving the world behind. Whispers, "Hello?" into the phone and waits for a reply. Thinks about coming back to him. Thinks about a lost kiss on a snowy night under the stars of Angel Grove. Thinks about losing love and finding happiness.

Thinks about him, and then his voice comes over the phone shining the name _KIMBERLY_ at her, and her heart jumps.

"Hi," he says, then, "Sorry," because Jason is always apologizing to her for something, and then, "Kimberly gave me the phone so – so we could talk."

"Oh," she says, the words tangling on her lips like she's a schoolgirl with a crush. "Okay. What about?"

He pauses. "I missed you. _Miss_ you. I mean – I saw you. In LA, last year. I should have said something."

"Right," she says, holding her free hand to her traitorous heart. "I saw you, too. I should have said something, too."

A chuckle and then quiet. "Kat – what happened to us?"

It's a loaded question. "Us?" she asks. "Like – like _us_ or – "

"No," he says quickly. "Us. Our team. What happened?"

"My team," she corrects softly, looking down at the name on her phone. He still talks to Kimberly, still talks to Trini and Zack, still calls Billy on Aquitar. She hasn't seen Adam in months. "You have your team."

"Kat," he sighs. "What happened with you and Tommy?"

That's a loaded question, too. She closes her eyes. "It's a long story."

"I have time," he says, and she can picture that smile on his face, half-bashful, half-amused, always caring, always kind. Always there when she needed him. Always – always red.

"He…he got involved with some things, in college. A guy named Anton Mercer, doing experiments with dinosaur DNA. We were dating on and off all through college, but every time I visited him…I just had such a bad feeling about it all. And he wouldn't listen. It was like he was – lost. In another world. He had his college friends, his new boss. Mercer was like – like a new Zordon to him. A creepier, evil scientist Zordon."

He laughs, making her smile. "You weren't wrong," he admits. "But he's better now, right?"

"It took a while," she says. "I guess getting back in action straightened him out. He and his new team – they solved the problem. I met with his friend, Hayley – the only good thing to come out of his college life – and she said Mercer is back to normal now. And Tommy and I – "

He's careful with his next words when she pauses. "You made up, right?"

"Right," she says slowly. "I went to visit him in Reefside." Flashes of memories come back to her in quick bursts – Tommy apologizing, Tommy yelling, the two of them fighting over monsters and loves and teammates and Adam being gone all the time and Tanya being a superstar and Rocky off winning tournaments by himself – and Jason – and _Kimberly_ – and nothing being the same and everything, _everything_ being the same.

Jason seems to piece it together. "So, you guys – "

"We're not together," she blurts out, then claps a hand over her mouth, wanting to melt into the bed. "I mean – it wasn't like that. Or – I guess it – never mind."

He chuckles over the line. "Hey, we're friends, right? It's fine."

There's a heavy, poignant pause. She says, "Of course," and it feels like one weight is lifted while another one crashes down on her. "I miss you, too," she admits.

He inhales, exhales. The sound of his breathing calms her adrenaline rush. "I wish high school had been different," he confides in her, his voice low and quiet, a secret passed through the phone.

She thinks about a different high school – no monsters, no spells, no curses, just them, just him and her, just the world waiting for them to conquer it. A better world, maybe, if she were a different kind of person.

"Me, too," she admits. "Just a little."

"Just enough," he finishes, and she laughs, and it feels like yesterday or maybe a better tomorrow.

-:-

 _so it's not this one. i can live with that.  
the world is full of wonders and a hundred years ago  
the moon was too much to dream of touching.  
look how far we've come.  
turn over your shoulder and just look._

 _maybe we'll come across each other_  
 _at the turning of the century,_  
 _racing across the breaches between worlds._  
 _i'll build my life on that maybe._

— elisabeth hewer

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